Spouse Colette Coursaget Children 3 Doctoral advisor Jean Kuntzmann | Name Alain Colmerauer Books Foundations of Prolog Ii Role Computer scientist | |
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Born 24 January 1941Carcassonne, France ( 1941-01-24 ) Thesis Precedences, analyse syntaxique et langages de programmation (1967) | ||
Alain Colmerauer (24 January 1941 – 12 May 2017) was a French computer scientist. He was a professor at Aix-Marseille University, and the creator of the logic programming language Prolog.
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Early life
Alain Colmerauer was born on 24 January 1941 in Carcassonne. He graduated from the Grenoble Institute of Technology, and he earned a Ph.D. from the Ensimag in Grenoble.
Career
Colmerauer spent 1967–1970 as Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal, where he created Q-Systems, one of the earliest linguistic formalisms used in the development of the TAUM-METEO machine translation prototype. Developing Prolog III in 1984, he was one of the main founders of the field of constraint logic programming.
Colmerauer became an associate professor at Aix-Marseille University in Luminy in 1970. He was promoted in 1979 to Full Professor. From 1993 to 1995, he was Head of the Laboratoire d’Informatique de Marseille (LIM), a joint laboratory of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the University de Provence and the University de la Mediterranee. Despite retiring as emeritus professor in 2006, he remained a member of the artificial intelligence taskforce in Luminy.
Colmerauer won an award from the regional council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, and in 1985 the Michel Monpetit Award, from the French Academy of Sciences. In 1986, he was made a knight of the Legion of Honour by the French government. He became Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1991, and received the ACP Research Excellence Award, Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming in 2008. He was also a Correspondent of the French Academy of Sciences in the area of Mathematics.
Death
Colmerauer died on 12 May 2017.